What forces people to lose trust in science? How does this affect the process of science itself? What are scientists doing to make this worse? How can we fix it? In this special episode themed from my latest book, I discuss these questions and more in today’s Ask a Spaceman!

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Hosted by Paul M. Sutter.

 

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT (Auto-Generated)

On the surface, everything's going great. There have been a bunch of polls, a a bunch of research on this, and what I'm about to say is going to be a very US centric point of view, because that's where I'm drawing my data from to make this argument that I'm about to make. But if you're tuning in from outside the United States, and I know many of you are, don't think you can play the not in my country card. This is a global issue. It just has different flavors, around the world, but we're gonna focus on the data that I have in front of me, which is polls and research taken in the United States.

57% of Americans say that science has a mostly positive effect on society. 57%. You can't get 57% of Americans to say that salad dressing has a mostly positive effect on society. 73% of US adults say they have a great deal or at least a fair amount of trust. In scientists, 73%.

That's doing better than cops, than public school principals, than religious leaders, than journalists, than business leaders, than elected officials, although that one's pretty low bar. But, oh, wow. 78% say that government investment in science is worthwhile. 1,000,000,000 of dollars flow from a dozen federal agencies into fundamental scientific research every single year. The vast majority of my own research has been publicly funded.

In times of crisis, we turn to scientists to give us advice and wisdom. When there's a major earthquake or or a huge weather event or, you know, a global pandemic, we turn to scientists, say, hey. Explain to me what is going on and give us some tips on how to get through this and how to prevent it from happening again. We rely on the fruits of scientific progress for our technological society. There are more students than ever before getting college degrees in the sciences, ensuring the next generation of scientific discovery.

But But we're scientists. We're fans of science. We know to look below the surface to see the hidden layers of reality and meaning. We're here to discover fundamental truths and apply that new knowledge to solve problems. So let's dig a little deeper and see if everything is as great as it seems.

Okay. 57% of US Americans say that science has a mostly positive effect on society. That's down from 73% in 2019. 73% of US adults have at least a fair amount of trust in scientists. That's down from 86% in 2019.

78% of people say investment in science is worthwhile, but they disagree about what science should be funded, and it falls along party lines. There's a schism between Republicans and Democrats. Different political groups will advance and want progress in certain scientific directions and not others. Democrats are much more likely to fund climate change research, but, not be so happy about, say, genetically modified food research. And then the reverse is true for Republicans.

Overall, Republicans, both leaders and voters, look far less favorably on science investment than Democrats? Yes. There are 1,000,000,000 of dollars flowing into scientific research. Public grant funding has been stagnant at best for the past 30 years. In many areas, it's been declining for 30 years, especially when measured against inflation and double especially when you look at it as a fraction of overall federal spending.

Every year, the federal government spends more and more and more money in the US, and a smaller and smaller fraction of it goes to fundamental scientific research. Yes. In times of crisis, we look to scientists for leadership. Those scientists also become targets of ridicule and scorn. They become hated and feared by large segments of the population.

We rely on the fruits of scientific research, but an increasing percentage of adults are nervous about the pace of scientific discovery and what we are learning. Look at all the conversations around genetics, CRISPR, AI. We like it when science makes new technology. We don't like it when it makes technology that we don't fully understand and can control. There are more students than ever before entering the sciences, but the majority of black, Latino, Native American students do not see science as a viable career path.

And they are often discriminated against, cannot find positions, cannot get advancement relative to their white peers despite having the exact same levels of aptitude. And surprise, surprise, there are essentially no jobs in scientific research. The vast majority of PhDs do not find careers doing science. In my own field, in astronomy, it's roughly 10 to 1. 10 PhDs are produced every year for every one open faculty position.

And that's all faculty positions including mostly teaching ones. 90% of the people getting PhDs in physics and astronomy do not end up doing physics or astronomy. Is this what we want? Do we want to live in a world where the public is increasingly distrustful of scientists? Where the public is increasingly distrustful and worried about what scientists learn?

Do we want to live in a world where science is a political football? Enjoying robust funding and, you know, pick any field, and then that one field only gets robust funding when one political party is in charge? Do we have to live in a world where the vast majority of young people that we are training to become scientists never become scientists? Where we encourage little kids to get into science careers and then don't give them jobs? Do we want to live in a world where the few remaining professional scientists are fighting over scraps of ever diminishing grant funding?

Do we want to live in a world where in times when we need science the most, large fractions of the population reject scientific advice out of hand because it's coming from scientists? And they don't trust scientists? I don't. I I want to live in a different world, a better world. But to get there, we first have to get out of a trap.

I have a new book coming out that discusses this trap. The book is called Rescuing Science, Restoring Trust in an Age of Doubt. It is a product of years of work. I actually wrote the first draft back, during COVID summer 2020 during lockdown. So I wrote this book.

It's been through the ringer. It's been a journey to get it published, but it's finally coming out. Of course, there's a Patreon offer. Here's your Patreon ad. Listen.

Please, please sign up for patreon. Patreon.com/pmsutter. If you sign up for at least $25 a month, I'll send you a free copy of the book autographed. Just free. You'll just get it.

I'll ask you your address. You give me the address, and a few days later, you'll get the book. It's that simple. If you're already at that tier, if you're already pledging at least $25 a month, you're gonna get a free book whether you like it or not. Well, okay.

I have to ask you your address, but don't worry. Soon, I will ask you for your address, and then you give me your address. You get a book. It's that simple. If if $25 a month is too much, don't sweat it.

You can do it once. Do it for 1 month. I'll send you a book, and then you cancel it. I don't mind. I want the book out there.

It's patreon.com/pmsutter. This offer expires I don't know. Let's pick a random date. April 1st. Anyone?

No. That sounds like April fools. By March 31st. This offer expires on March 31st. Anyone who signs up at $25 a month and up, by March 31st, you'll get a free book.

And I wanna talk about my book and the themes of the book, and the book is about trust. Because I believe that the root cause of many of the problems with modern science is a lack of trust. The thesis of my book is that we're stuck in a cycle where lack of trust ultimately leads to less funding, which brings out all sorts of dysfunctions. These dysfunctions lead to a lack further lack of trust, and then on and on the washing machine goes. For this episode and for my book, I I speak from the heart a lot.

I'm I'm very passionate about this. I care about this. I want science to succeed. I want science to be trusted. I want science to be liked.

I want to ensure the survival of my discipline for decades, for centuries to come, but I'm worried about the state we're in. I'm worried about this declining trust and the results it has on the scientific community, and then how we as a scientific community are not handling it very well. So I'm gonna be saying uncomfortable things. I'm gonna be talking about how scientists themselves are perpetuating this cycle of ever diminishing trust. Because when I look at the the whole situation, yeah, I know there are big chunks of people who simply don't trust science.

There's not much I can do about them. I can't just go to them and say, hey. Can you start trusting science now? That's not gonna work. I certainly can't demand it.

I can't change someone else. It's actually incredibly difficult to change someone else's mind. Have you ever tried to change someone's mind? It's actually really hard. But I can change myself.

I can work to change my peers and my colleagues, how we approach ourselves, how we approach the public, and then I can hope that that leads to greater trust. When I see, you know, someone who deeply, deeply distrust science, any aspect of science, whether it's anti vaxx, climate change denial, the people who tell me that gravity doesn't really exist, whoever they are, I can't combat them. I can't engage them on the facts, the the rationality, the evidence. That's not how they reach their conclusion. So, that's not how they're gonna come out of their conclusion.

Instead, I have to change myself. Instead, I have to change how I approach the public and I how I encourage my peers to approach the public. And you, the listener, even if you're not in the sciences, it's important for you to know about these dysfunctions, about how the lack of trust in science is leading to a lack of funding and how that's hurting science and how scientists aren't handling it well. It's a pretty stressful situation as a scientist, and we don't handle long term stress well. And so I need you to hear it so that you can be an advocate for change too.

What I'm about to say isn't going to make science look very good, not as a philosophical tool for exploring the natural world, but in a professional practice that depends on public funding to survive. Of course, there are individual scientists that are gonna buck the trend. There are institutions that are trying hard, of course. And I commend them. And they there needs to be more of that, but I'm gonna talk about the bad stuff.

As we're going to see, it all comes down to money. The lack of money in science is making it harder to be a scientist, and it's making it harder for scientists to connect with society, and this leads to a further lack in trust. So science needs more money. But but the game is, I I, as a scientist who loves my discipline and wants to see it succeed for generations to come, is that we simply can't get more funding by demanding it. We can't just say, hey.

All you folks, you voters out there who who don't trust science, can we have some more money? That's not gonna work. Instead, we have to work within the current system where trust is declining, where funding is tight. We have to work in that system to rebuild trust, then leverage that trust to get more funding and more success. And the only way to play that game is by fixing ourselves and how we approach the science society relationship, and then hope that it leads to more stable funding.

To see how this all works, let's start with the bare fact of a lack of funding and go from there. And for the past 30 years, like I said, funding for all the scientists for all the sciences had has generally had a downwards trend. Occasionally, a specific field or during a specific administration, there'll be a a small boost, but that doesn't return the funding to previous levels. It just merely delays the decline. This is bad for science because the vast majority of fundamental research relies on public funding through NASA, the National Science Foundation, National Institute of Health, Department of Energy, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.

Yes. There are private research organizations. They're funding scientific research, but they're a drop in the bucket. And for sure, there's corporate sponsored research, but that's a whole different animal. I'm talking about fundamental science here, basic research that has no goal except to learn more about the universe.

That is what is critically endangered in the modern era. The continued drop in funding leads to 3 immediate effects, 3 branches of dysfunction in how scientists work with each other, in how scientists work with their junior colleagues and students, in how scientists work with the public. Each of these three consequences of tighter funding themselves have follow on effects that all connect back to an increase in mistrust, and the cycle starts anew. So let's pick apart these three branches and see how scientists aren't handling the lack of funding very well. The first dysfunction is how scientists work with each other.

How do we work through with each other through papers and grants? You know, grants are the lifeblood of science. If you want to do research, you need grants. Yes. You'll typically have your salary if you're at a a research institution, say university.

You'll have your salary. You'll have to teach to earn that salary. But if you wanna hire students, if you want to travel to conferences, if you want to publish articles, guess what? Publishing an article costs upwards of $1,000. If you want to reduce your teaching load so you can do more research on your own time, if you want to be a productive member of the scientific community and not just do research in the margins of your time at, like, 2 AM, you need grants.

The ability to win grants is the number one priority of most research scientists. Universities also encourage their scientists to win grants because they get a cut of all the grant funding as much as 50%. So if I, as a researcher, I get this giant $1,000,000 award, universities are going to take $500,000 for themselves. This is a source of revenue for universities. So, of course, they're going to encourage their scientists who are on faculty with them to get those grants and then maybe not promote them and maybe fire them if they can't get those grants.

A typical top tier university will require a tenure track professor. If you're if you get hired, you have 5 years or so, roughly, to prove yourself at a at a top research university. And in those 5 years, you have to pull in roughly at least $5,000,000 worth of grants in order to proceed, in order to have a career. But grant funding is so tight that the typical award rate is less than 20%. So you have to apply year after year after year.

How do you win grants? How how do you increase your chances of winning grants? By writing papers. There's this favorite phrase spoken by every academic, publish or perish. You either publish papers or you're out.

Folks, across all sciences, this number is insane. Every year, there are 3,000,000 scientific papers written around the world. Yes, it's all fields across the world. Yes, I know. But still, 3,000,000 papers written every year.

Because the more you write, the higher your impact, the better chances of winning a grant, the more you will advance in your career. Get hired, get tenure, get awards, get promoted, fame, riches, you know, the usual. There is an intense pressure to publish. Often, you need to write papers, you need to write a lot of them. And they need to be big.

They can't just be small little papers, they need to be make big statements that get lots of citations because we're gonna measure citations, and it's gonna be great. And we'll measure citations, and that's how we'll judge if a scientist is doing a good job or not. And if they're doing a good job, they're more likely to win grants, more likely to get hired, more likely to get tenure, more likely to get promoted. It all comes down to papers. You gotta write papers.

I remember as a graduate student and as a postdoc a postdoc, by the way, is a a temporary research position that's sandwiched between getting your PhD and being on, faculty somewhere. It's a postdoctoral research position in astrophysics, you typically have, 2 to 3 of them before you're considered worthy enough for a scientific career. I would ask during grad school and during my postdocs, like, hey. What do I need to do? What do I need to I'm interested in faculty positions.

I wanna apply. You know, how do I best position myself? The only advice I got, and I swear, this is the only piece of advice I ever got, Keep writing papers. That was it. Write papers.

What does this lead to? Well, it leads to a rise in fraud because you need big results now, and so you're more likely to fake the data, make things up, go fishing, you know, just collect a whole bunch of data and then look for random correlations and publish on that. I could do a whole episode on that. That's called p hacking, by the way. Go ahead and ask.

Exaggerate claims or just be lazy. Just rush just rush through. Don't triple check. Don't even double check. Just you get a result.

It seems plausible. Let's publish it. They'll probably pass peer review because the peers are all super busy and don't have time for this. So you just be lazy. Leads to a rise in garbage research.

Just junk written for the sake of publishing, not really advancing knowledge in any meaningful or significant way. Just doing small projects with fast turnaround and near guaranteed results. Like, oh, we're gonna do what we did before, but just with a different sample population, we're gonna publish. And if the results don't come out the way we want, well, we'll massage the statistics a little to make it look better. This also leads to risk aversion.

Grants rarely go to game changing radical ideas. It's better to play it safe because there's not a lot of money to go around. So the best grant proposals proposals are the ones where you say, well, we're gonna do what we did before, but we're gonna do it a little bit better or a little bit bigger. That's much more safe, much more secure. Here, the advancement of science slows down.

It becomes a machine for generating new work, but very little discovery. This rise in fraud, the rise in garbage research, and the risk aversion leads to a loss in trust of science overall, because it because it means that science doesn't deliver on its promises. We're producing science but not advancing in the system of checks that science is supposed to use to prevent fraud and incorrect ideas are drowning in a sea of publications. The public just doesn't know what's legitimate science or not. When people don't trust science, I don't blame them sometimes because it's hard to tell what's good and what's bad.

The second dysfunction is how scientists work with students. Universities are trying to make as much money as possible, you know, basically, just like everybody. Won't single them out. We're all trying to make a buck. Patreon.com/pmstutter.

State level funding keeps dropping. So the universities have to turn to grants, which I just talked about, and they have to turn to more students because they come with student loans. These loans are cheap to get, easy to get, nearly impossible to kill. Folks says at the time of the writing of this episode, I have exactly 2 payments remaining on my undergraduate student loans from nearly 2 decades ago. Universities are raking it in, making money hand over fist, and students are signing up in droves.

Undergraduate enrollment is through their typical science programs have double, tripled the number of students they did just 20 years ago, but there's no long term support for these students. There aren't new faculty lines or permanent research positions. So we train future scientists, but don't give them careers in science. They go through a meat grinder for undergraduate degree, then a PhD 5 or 6 years later, then a postdoc for, you know, 3 to 9 years. And then they might get a faculty appointment, and that is just tenure track that takes 5 years to prove themselves if they are not able to pull in the grants.

Sorry. You're kicked to the curb, and you're done. You're kept busy and underpaid and overworked. The vast majority of graduate students report extreme amounts of stress, like health effects due to the amount of work they have to do. This is in your most productive years in your twenties and early thirties.

You're expected to hop around the country multiple times, and then you only get a chance at a faculty position. And there are a lot of short term appointments because funding for short term appointments is just fine because it's easy to sell. Well, I just need enough money to pay for a post doc for a couple years. It's very hard to sell. Well, I we need to open up an entire new faculty position, a permanent position in the university.

That's that's a multi decade commitment. No one's gonna go for that. Faculty lines are dropping. Permanent positions are falling. Temporary positions are rising.

So you get PhDs being produced, then they go through postdocs, and then in their early thirties, oh, by the way, there are no jobs. Good luck. I have seen this happen to myself, to so many of my friends who are rising through PhD and post docs with me, and then there are just no jobs. This leads to a lack of trust because we keep telling kids that they need to get into the sciences, but the fundamental sciences, the departments themselves don't treat it like a job training program, but instead the curriculum is still designed to create future scientists, but then we don't turn these people into scientists. We're not delivering on the goods.

We're lying to kids. We're creating a generation of disillusioned people who couldn't make it in science not because they weren't good enough or smart enough, but simply because there are too many people and the competition is weird and toxic. When we lie to kids, we get grown ups who don't trust us. And this also makes it impossible for any marginalized or minority group to succeed. Built in biases are compounded because of the competition pressures are so high.

Senior people make safe hiring bets and safe usually means, well, this person looks like a younger version of myself. The majority of science professors are trained at only a dozen universities. One dozen universities are producing the majority of science faculty across the country. Black PhD students, Latino PhD, Native American PhD students are actually dropping relative to total numbers. Yes.

They're increasing slow, but they're being outcompeted, let alone advancing. And this leads to a lack of trust because you have entire marginalized communities that don't see science as a viable career option, don't see science as sympathetic or understanding of their socioeconomic situation. This gets to me. Like, how many Einsteins are we leaving behind? There are so many smart kids who are just born in the wrong circumstances and don't get a shot at science because of these built in biases and the horrible competition.

We have entire communities that view science as a white man's game. And if that's not grounds for mistrust, I don't know what is. And the third dysfunction, the last dysfunction is how scientists relate to the public. There are 2 ways to do this where scientists are not connecting healthily to the public. 1 is through politicization.

This is when science is hijacked and used for political gain. When science is viewed as a platform for one particular party or special interest and not as a benefit for all humanity. Absolutely, Science can be used in politics. In fact, there is this attitude among scientists that they should not get involved in politics. That our science stands apart.

That we simply produce the results and stand aside. And I actually think this is a horrible idea. Because what gets happened is that if scientists are encouraged to stay politically neutral, then their voices get robbed from them, then their results are taken from them, their papers, their work is taken from them, and then used by politicians. I don't know if you've encountered politicians before, but typically, they will do anything to win, to get ahead, to stay in office, and they will exploit science. Science has an air of trust and responsibility and respectability.

But when scientists themselves aren't a part of the process, then the results that scientists use can and will be taken out of context. Misconstrued, twisted, fitted to an agenda and the scientist isn't there to say hold on a minute, you're misusing my science, it's actually more nuanced than that, it's more limited than that. We can't say that. The scientist isn't there because there is this culture and science to stay out of politics. And when scientists do get involved in politics, it usually backfires because there there aren't enough in them.

I'm thinking back to, shortly after Trump was elected president, there was the march for science across the country, which was really just an anti Trump rally, which fine if you wanna have an anti Trump rally, you know, have 10 of them. That's that's the beauty of living in a democratic system where we can we are free to express ourselves, have all the rallies you want. But by attaching, this is the mistake I believe that the organizers of the march for science did. Because it was obviously an anti Trump rally. They were tying science to being anti Trump, which means they are tying science to be anti Republican.

Folks, Republicans make up half the country in half the time roughly. They're the ones in charge deciding who gets money and who doesn't get money. Do we want science to only be funded half the time? Do we want only half the country to support science? If you believe that Republicans are anti science, they're the first people you should be talking to, not shouting at.

Absolutely, science can be used in the political process as an aid to policy making. We need all the information we can get to make informed decisions, but science doesn't always fit with policy making. It's slow. It's often contradictory. It can make mistakes.

And when scientists aren't out front and center explaining the caveats, the limitations of their research, it becomes yet another political tool with one party championing the science and the other party demonizing science. That's not where we wanna be. We wanna be the bridge builders. We wanna be the community makers. We don't want science to be attached to one single political party.

That's a bad idea. And because scientists aren't involved in the political process, they're not involved with the public and a wall grows between them. This leads to disdain, disparagement. As scientists withdraw from the public and from making their voices heard they focus on winning grants Writing papers means there's no time for anything else including science communication The public pays for science through taxes, and yet the vast majority of scientists spend let me see here. My note, right.

Zero time engaging with the public. 0. Scientists are discouraged from engaging in science communication. If you're up if if if someone's trying to decide, if you have a hiring committee is evaluating you, if you had a 10 year review committee is considering giving you tenure, if you're up for promotion, they will look at your science outreach and communication at best, neutrally, and usually, negatively. Why?

Because that's time taken away from winning grants. It's time taken away from the money. There are no incentives for Scientists to do that. In fact, there are hostile attitudes that I have personally experienced in many departments. Folks, I was once called a lapsed scientist.

In fact, one of the early reviewers, academic reviewers for one version of the book went through an academic publisher, and one of the referees on the book said I was a, disgruntled scientist who was bitter because I couldn't make it in the field. You know, despite the fact that I continue scientific research, I spend most of my time in outreach and communication. To a scientist established in the university, that's a bad thing because it means you're not winning grants. You're not getting money. I can't exaggerate how damaging this is.

How are we expected to build trust with the general public? You know, the people paying the bills if they don't even understand what we're doing because we're not even explaining it to them. So, yeah, lack of trust. All these branches, all these consequences of a lack of funding all lead to less and less trust, less belief, less care, less attention. And to complete this cycle, this lack of trust circles back to an unwillingness to publicly fund it.

I'll say it again. Modern science is built on public funding, which means we as scientists serve at the pleasure of the public. If they're not on board with this program, if the public believes that their money is better spent elsewhere, then they will make that opinion known, and they do through a continued drop in funding for science. So that's the cycle we're stuck in. Like I said, we can't just ask for more funding because more funding is a result not a cause of a better relationship between science and the public.

The good news is it's not too late. At worst, we'll simply adapt to the new reality and have a healthier science ecosystem, which is good for its its own sake, and at best we'll get more money, and we'll be able to grow the scientific practice. Either way, there's nothing to lose. I have some ideas on how to work on these three dysfunctions. Some of these ideas will be simple and straightforward, some of them are completely off the wall insane.

But I believe that science is in such poor shape that experimenting with something is better than doing nothing. Because if it turns out to be a bad idea, we can always change our mind. We're scientists. We're supposed to experiment. We're supposed to live in this mode where we try things, doesn't work.

Okay. Go back to the drawing board. Let's put our own philosophy into practice in our careers and our relationship with the public. So one, we need to change how scientists work with each other. We need to change the grant process.

We need to take riskier grant bets. We need to favor young scientists rather than older established scientists. We need to introduce randomization. Let's shake things up a bit. Let's go crazy.

See what happens when we just fund random stuff. We need science to be bold. We need it to be experimental. We need some new ideas. We need to shake up the mainstream.

We need to make sure that new generations represented by younger scientists get a better shot. The current grant funding system highly favors older established researchers because they've written more papers and therefore have a higher impact. But older faculty researchers are more likely to do what they've just been doing, only more so we need new ideas. The old fogies will be fine. New people are much more likely to come up with new ideas.

We need to randomize portions of the grant selection process to take away the illusion of a fair competition, because guess what? It's not. Some ideas just won't seem good to a peer review panel, but they can still be good and produce awesome science. We need to invest in more high risk, high reward programs that change what the future looks like. We need to disfavor small incremental gains.

We need to disfavor giant collaborations. We need smaller projects with riskier adventures. Coupled with that, we need to change the publication process. We need to completely revamp the publishing paradigm. There are 1,000 of journals making 1,000,000,000 of dollars every year.

Why? Why? It's not 1924. Just type it up and put it online. Heck, go to arxiv.org.

Archive.org.arxiv.org. Almost every single journal article in physics, astronomy, cosmology, mathematics, computer science, a bunch of other fields goes online for free. It's right there. It's a repository of preprints. It's right there.

That's how most scientists access journal articles is not through Yep. Nature.com. It's through the archive. Why do we have the journals anymore? What are we doing?

Why are we paying over $1,000 per article to get them published? What are they doing? Is it peer review? I could do a whole episode on peer review. Chuck it.

We're done. We also need to strongly change the culture and science to favor replication, cross checking. We need to reduce this emphasis on impact because that is leading to a rise in fraud because people guess what? When you incentivize something, like, you need to write a lot of papers and they need to be big. Guess what?

You're gonna get a lot of people who are faking it or lazy about it, and they get a good result, and they don't bother double checking to see if it's bad. We need to publish less. We need fewer papers coming out. We need to slow it down so we can actually keep up and read each other's work. We need to focus on quality over quantity.

We need to take our time. One great paper is worth more than 10 garbage ones. Slowing down the pace of publication will help us fight fraud, laziness. We can be more strict about it. It's easier to police this if there are fewer papers to go over.

We need to emphasize community building, cross pollination of ideas, intergovernmental collaboration, development of code repositories, tools, resources that assist in polities policy decisions or public understanding. We need to wait all this. We need to get away from just measuring publication, paper counts, citation counts. It's horrible. It's a bad idea.

Oh, but how do we measure success? Guess what, buddy? You don't. Stop pretending that you ever could. We measured publication count, citation count, and assumed that this was giving us a measure of the impact and worth worthiness of a scientist.

It wasn't. Never was. We're just getting people that are good at gaming the system, not good at producing good science. 2nd, we need to change how scientists work with students. We need to change career process.

We need to train young scientists for jobs outside academia. Like, I mean, basic stuff here, like how to build a resume. We need to create connections to industry and open up the recruiting pipelines. We need to be frank and honest about career expectations. We need to make sure that every person that intersects the science department at a university comes out as a lifelong fan of science.

We need to say, oh, hey. Welcome incoming class. Most of you are not gonna have a job in the sciences because there are not enough jobs in the sciences, but you can still have all these amazing things in your life, and we are going to support it. Folks, when people would go into industry, people talk about the people who left academia the same way you'd speak of, like, the recently deceased. Oh, did you hear about Margaret?

Yeah. Yeah. She was really promising, but, she went into industry. Where'd she go? I don't know.

I don't know. I I don't keep in touch with her anymore. It's bizarre and it's toxic and it's harmful for an entire generation of scientists. We need to reduce the number of short term positions, these postdocs, this gap, this buffer between getting a PhD and getting a faculty position. Because what happens is because there are so many postdocs available, if you if you get a PhD and you want a short term research position, there's generally a position out there.

So you think you're doing great in science and you're advancing in your career, and then boom, your early thirties happen and you're stuck. We need to cut it off earlier. If PhDs aren't gonna get a long term position in science, we need to get them out the door sooner so that they can pivot, so they can have a life when they're younger. Before they're trying to buy a house and have a family. We need to actively recruit for minority communities and put strict safeguards in place to prevent harassment.

We need to create mentorship, community building opportunities. We need to ensure that everyone feels welcome and supported. Why? Because new people have new ideas. Different people with different backgrounds are how you get a variety of experiences and that's how you get a variety of ideas and concepts.

Trust me. The white kid who went to prep school and got a degree from Harvard is going to be fine regardless of their career. And ironically, they don't always make for safe bets. Kids who have all the privileges given to them in life, of course, they're gonna look good on an application. They had research opportunities.

They had mentorship. They had connections. Their resume for a graduate program, for a post doc position, for a faculty appointment is going to look amazing because it's relatively easy for them to look good because they're given all the advantages. And then when you hire them, they turn into mediocre researchers because once you take away all the privileges and all the connections, then you just get an average scientist. Because once they hit reality and they're fighting for grants just like everybody else and all their privileges and opportunities that their parents placed for them, structured for them go away, they don't really shine anymore.

No. We need to money ball this. We need to find the above average performers who faced adverse circumstances. If there's some black kid in the Bronx who is doing even a little bit above average, you know, given the circumstances, all the adversity that they're facing, all the discrimination bias, lack of opportunities, lack of connection, and they're doing even slightly above average, they are more likely to really shine when they're given the right tools because they're fighters. They're survivors.

And lastly, we need to change how scientists interact with the public. We need to change the relationship with the public. Scientists need to be more active in politics. It sounds counterintuitive to be hear me out. Being silent obviously isn't working, turning half the country against us.

So what if people, especially ones antagonistic to science, heard about the science from the scientists themselves, about their stories, their passions, their conclusions? What if we were seen as humans? We don't want science to be perceived as infallible because we do get things wrong. So we need to be a part of the process and debate of decision making, not sitting on the sidelines. Science is messy and doesn't have all the answers and we need to be upfront and honest about that.

And we need to communicate. We need to train scientists to communicate with the public. We need to make them do it. We need to incentivize them. We need to make it a part of the education experience.

We need to make it part of faculty expectations. We need to make it part of their paycheck. You want to get paid? Professor, get out there to the public and start talking. You, the general public, needs to hear from more scientists more often period, full stop.

More interviews, more podcasts, more social media, we just need to do it. Yeah. Science communication is difficult. It's hard to translate cutting edge research full of jargon and math into something that the general public can appreciate and understand. I won't argue otherwise, but scientists are among the smartest human beings on the planet.

So I'm sure they'll be able to figure it out. There are outside forces that scientists can't control, But we can control our reaction to those forces. People are losing trust in science. Funding for science is going down. We can't tackle that directly.

We can only indirectly change this. We have to change our community from within. I can't promise that any of these ideas will work or lead to more trust. And yes, it does take systematic change from top to bottom, left to right. Not in the methods of science itself, but in the day to day operations of science.

In how scientists conduct themselves and how they communicate their work, in the relationships that they build, the stories they tell. I won't tell you how important science is for the modern world or how powerful it is as a tool for understanding nature. I suspect you already know that. That's why you subscribe to this podcast. But if we want science to thrive for decades if not centuries to come, then we need to make changes.

Otherwise I fear that if we let the current cycles spiral out of control, we'll lose everything we love about science. I don't know about you, but I'm not satisfied with the way things are. Where half the population is suspicious of science. Politicians use science as a football to toss back and forth. Young scientists can't get jobs.

Whole populations feel marginalized. I want more science. I want more people entering into scientific careers. I want more funding for basic research. Most importantly I want as many people as possible to understand, appreciate and enjoy science regardless of politics or beliefs.

I want them to see the value in science and for that I want science to be valuable. I want to live in a better world and I believe that we can make one. Thank you for listening. As a reminder, if you contribute on Patreon at $25 and up before March 31st, I'll send you an autograph copy of the book. If you don't wanna go that route, that's fine.

You can preorder it now. The title is Rescuing Science, Restoring Trust in an Age of Doubt. Thank you to Louis m on Patreon for the question that led to today's episode. My publisher and my agent for actually getting this book out there. And I'd like to thank my top Patreon contributors this month.

That's Justin g, Chris l, Barbike, Alberto m, Duncan m, Corey d, Nyla, John s, Joshua, Scott m, Rob h, Lewis m, John w, Alexis, Aaron j, Gilbert m, and Valerie h. And again, that's patreon.com/pm. Sorry. Keep the questions coming. I love the questions.

I love connecting with all of you. Hashtag ask a spaceman. Askaspaceman@gmail.com or the website askaspaceman.com. And I will see you next time for more. Site askaspaceman.com, and I will see you next time for more complete knowledge of time and space.

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